Montague
Ullman, MD died from a stroke on June 7, 2008 with loved
ones by his side. He was emeritus professor at Einstein
College and a highly collaborative pioneer in dream work
who authored over eighty professional papers and several
books, including Behavioral Changes in Patients
Following Strokes (1962). He co-authored
Working with Dreams (1979) and Dream Telepathy
(1973, 2nd Ed. 2003), and co-edited The Variety of
Dream Experience (1987, 2nd Ed. 1999) and
Handbook of States of Consciousness (1986). His
books have been translated into a variety of languages,
with his last volume, Appreciating Dreams—A Group
Approach (1996), translated into Chinese in 2007. A
recent release is Ingrid Blidberg’s Swedish film,
Catch the Dream, featuring Ullman and his dream
process. A fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Ullman
was a charter fellow of the American Academy of
Psychoanalysis, a life fellow of the American
Psychiatric Association, and past president of the
Society of Medical Psychoanalysts and the American
Society for Psychical Research. He also served as
president of the Parapsychological Association and the
Gardner Murphy Research Institute. In 2006, Montague
Ullman was the recipient of an honorary Lifetime
Achievement Award (and membership) by the International
Association for the Study of Dreams, in recognition of
his leadership in the dream community. He was cited,
among other accomplishments, for his role as “father of
the group dream work movement that has taken hold all
around the world” and through his serious scientific
approach, increased the credibility of the study of
precognitive and telepathic dreams.

In the field
of psychohistory, Ullman supported the Psychohistory
Forum from its inception in 1983—his name graces our
letterhead. Besides occasionally writing on dreams for
this journal, in a series of workshops and individual
consultation, he helped to develop the Historical
Dreamwork Method, always insisting upon rigorous
methodological standards.

As a result of being
invited to write an extensive autobiographical essay, in
his early seventies Monte (everyone called him Monte)
provided a most insightful description of his family
background, education, emotions, accomplishments and
life in general, which we quote liberally below (See
Arthur S. Berger, “Autobiographical Notes – Montague
Ullman,” Lives and Letters in American
Parapsychology: A Biographical History, 1850-1987,
1988). It has enabled us to write more about his
adolescence and motivation than is usually the case in
memorial.

Montague Ullman was born in New
York City on September 9, 1916 as the elder of two sons
and first of three children to the daughter of Polish
immigrants and an immigrant from Hungary who had come to
America as a teenager. His father William was “generous
to a fault,” “a superb salesman” who “smoked heavily,
drank, overate” and gambled. He built the family
business manufacturing men’s hats and overcoats, prior
to his early death from a stroke on his forty-fourth
birthday. The family moved from the Lower East Side to
the Bronx to middle class respectability on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan. Monte’s conventional mother,
Nettie Eisler Ullman, “was a superb cook and baker but
given to hysterical anxiety at the slightest
provocation.” She loved “babies and small children but
didn’t do so well when the child’s struggles to
individuate itself began.” She never fully recovered
from the sudden death of her husband.

The
Ullman’s household was not intellectual, but the parents
did aspire for their children to get a good education
and advance themselves. Monte reported, “as far as I
could remember, I never saw my mother or father ever
read a book.” However, his “father’s best friend” often
came for Sabbath (Friday night) dinner and “did read and
became the first inspirational figure” of Monte’s life.
He was the family doctor who was “a very comforting
presence when we were ill…[who] would overcome our
apprehension with the songs he made up as he examined us
and the way he made us laugh.” This association of
laughter with healing is perhaps an ingredient in
Monte’s subsequent career as a healer, who had a twinkle
in his eye, as he used dreams as a curative instrument.
He was drawn to medicine by “family pressures as well as
my own aspirations.” He came to feel “at odds” with his
parents, growing up “rejecting their world of bourgeois,
religious, commercial values.” His distance from his
parents, including their staunch Republicanism, was
painful but “also made it possible for me to follow my
own path.” His own path would lead him to being drawn to
communism and, far more importantly, paranormal
research.After attending a three-year
high school in New York, just before his fifteenth
birthday, he enrolled in City College of New York. He
reports being “bright enough to handle the work but
inside I felt like the immature child I was. I wanted
very much to get into medical school and to get the
grades necessary for admission” but the competition was
“severe.” To his deep mortification, his father, who “so
wanted me to become a doctor that, despite some
resistance and shame on my part, he was not above using
influence to ease my admission into medical school at
New York University at the end of my third year at
college.” Though he found “the first two years at
medical school” to be “difficult” there was “a deep
satisfaction that came from the fascination of the
subject matter and the prestige of being a medical
student.”

In college, extracurricular exposure
to psychic phenomena oriented him to the mysteries of
the unconscious realm of existence, including dream
life. Just turned sixteen, he knew nothing about
psychical research and was studying hard to prepare for
medical school, when a science classmate friend confided
in him about his personal encounter with psychic
phenomena in a series of Saturday night séances. This
experience evolved into a very serious project and
inspired Monte to be a psychic researcher. Sixty years
later, he brought together five of the group that had
participated in the séances and published an account of
it in 2001 in the Journal of the American Society
for Psychical Research.In January
1939, Monte began four years of hospital training: two
as an intern, one as a neurology resident, and one as a
psychiatric resident at the New York State Psychiatric
Institute. His background in neurology oriented him to
the neurophysiology of dreaming; his practice in
psychoanalysis oriented him to the metaphorical
structure and healing potential of the dream, and later
work in community psychiatry impressed upon him the
importance of identifying and sharing the skills
necessary to make dreams generally accessible.

In 1942, preparing for his psychoanalytic career, he
went into personal analysis, which was interrupted when
he was drafted into the Army where he served as a
captain. Upon his discharge in December 1945, he opened
an office for the practice of neurology and psychiatry,
moving into psychoanalysis in 1946 as he completed
training, and began teaching, at the New York Medical
College. The 1950s solidified his three major interests:
exciting new approaches to psychoanalytic thinking and
practice, a growing interest in dreams, and bringing the
paranormal into the mainstream of his life. Ullman
terminated his private practice and left the New York
Medical College in 1961 to develop a department of
psychiatry at Maimonides Hospital (later Maimonides
Medical Center) in Brooklyn.

In 1962 Monte
Ullman established the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides
with a grant ob­tained by Gardner Murphy that enabled
the exploration of dreams and telepathy. In 1967 he also
developed, and later operated, a community mental health
center noteworthy for launching many innovative
community programs to provide preventive psychiatry.
Monte’s lifelong commitment to helping ordinary people,
which had led him to left wing causes and to visit the
Soviet health care system in 1938, informed his
decisions to establish a community mental health program
focused on prevention, and to develop a method of
bringing the healing power of dreamwork to ordinary
people.

The work of Monte and his collaborators
constituted the primary source of experimental evidence
that the content of dreams may be related to tele­pathy.
One of the great parapsychological advances of the late
twentieth century came through his use of physiological
methodology for monitoring dreams. Using the EEG to
record brain waves and the Rapid-Eye-Movement technique
to record eye movements permitted him to discern when
sleeping subjects were dreaming and for how long, priorto waking them for their dream reports.

In
1974, Monte awakened to the work of the late physicist
David Bohm and developed the concept of a connection
between the mystery of dreaming consciousness and Bohm’s
approach to still unsettled issues in quantum theory. He
resigned from Maimonides to pursue his interest in
dreams elsewhere. In Sweden from 1974 to 1976, he
developed a group dream work process, resulting in the
formation of a national society in 1990. The Dream Group
Forum, followed in 2003 with the Dream Group Forum in
Finland. Both groups were committed to extending dream
work into the community, an undertaking based on that
experiential group method Monte initiated. It proved
suitable not only as a training instrument for
professional therapists, but also for making dream work
accessible to the interested layman.

Returning
to the United States, Ullman joined the Albert Einstein
College of Medicine as clinical professor of psychiatry,
and the Westchester Center for the Study of
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy to teach therapists in
training about his group method. He became more and more
convinced that serious and effective dream work could
extend beyond the consulting room into the community.
Monte became known for devotion in teaching his approach
to both therapists and laity internationally.

Toward the end of his life, Monte reflected upon
telepathy as a mental field derived from the universal
unconscious. Thus, he had meshed his work in telepathic
dreaming with the connectedness of the dream group
process and Bohm’s theory of connectivity. He was a
director of the Lifwynn Foundation believing that
fragmentation of our unity as a species has evolved
because we fail to recognize our interconnectedness.
Ullman elaborated, “Our dreams are concerned with the
nature of our connections with others. The history of
the human race, while awake, is a history of
fragmentation, of separating people and communities of
people ... nationally, religiously, politically” but
while asleep “our dreams are connected with the basic
truth that we are all members of a single species.”

Monte was a happy, charming, gentle soul who never
forgot to be human. His enormous compassion and
infectious humor effected people in every walk of life.
Many described him as a profoundly modest man and a
humanitarian who made a significant human and scientific
contribution to the world. His impact on psychiatry,
psychology and parapsychology is a substantial legacy
reflecting his wisdom, his insight and his critical
acumen.

Dr. Ullman was husband of the late Janet
(Simon), father of Susan Ullman, William Ullman and Lucy
Bain; grandfather of four, great-grandfather of one,
brother of Bob Ullman and the late Jean Blake who died
the day before he did, and companion of Judy Gardiner.

Contributors to
the September 2008 Edition on the 2008 American Election and the
Ullman Memorial

James
William Anderson, PhD, a psychologist and
psychoanalyst, is Clinical Professor, Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern
University, and a faculty member at the Chicago
Institute for Psychoanalysis. Editor of the Annual
of Psychoanalysis, he has published
psychobiographical essays on Frank Lloyd Wright, William
and Henry James, Woodrow Wilson, and Edith Wharton, as
well as a series of papers on the methodology of
psychobiography. Professor Anderson may be contacted at
j-anderson3@northwestern.edu.

Sho
Araiba was born in 1983 and grew up in Tokyo
before becoming an international student in America.
After attending SUNY Rockland Community College from
2003 to 2005 he continued his study in psychology at
CUNY Queens College from 2005 to 2007. In 2008 he will
begin a masters program in psychology (Learning and
Behavior Analysis) at CUNY Queens College.

Herbert Barry III, Ph.D., is a
psychologist who became a faculty member in the
University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy in 1963,
Professor in 1970, and Professor Emeritus in 2001. From
1970 to 2001 he had an adjunct appointment as Professor
in the Anthropology Department of the School of Arts and
Sciences. He is a member of the Psychohistory Forum and
was president (1991-1992) of the International
Psychohistory Association (IPA). An early publication is
“Relationships Between Child Training and the Pictorial
Arts,” (1957) Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology, vol. 54, pp. 380-383. One of his
current research projects is on the choice by novelists
of the names of the fictional characters. Professor
Barry may be contacted at
barryh@pitt.edu.

Rudolph Binion, PhD, Leff
Families Professor of Modern European History, has
taught comparative history and psychohistory at Brandeis
University since 1967. His most recent psychohistorical
book is Past Impersonal: Group Process in Human
History (2005). A member of the Editorial Board of
Clio’s Psyche, he may be contacted at
binion@brandeis.edu.

Sander J. Breiner, MD, is
Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric
Association, a professor of psychiatry at two medical
schools at Michigan State University, and one medical
school at Wayne State University. In addition to being a
Research Associate of the Psychohistory Forum, he is a
Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst, and author of
over 100 scientific articles and books, which include
Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse Through the
Ages and Today (1990). Dr. Breiner may be contacted
at sjbreiner@comcast.net.

Kelly
Bulkeley, PhD, is a Visiting Scholar at the
Graduate Theological Union and teaches in the Dream
Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University, both in
the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned his doctorate in
Religion and Psychological Studies from the University
of Chicago Divinity School and is a former president of
the International Association for the Study of Dreams.
He has written and edited several books on dreaming,
most recently Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A
Comparative History (NYU Press, 2008) and
American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the
Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and
Everyone Else (Beacon Press, 2008). Professor
Bulkeley may be contacted at kellybulkeley@earthlink.net.

Paul H.
Elovitz, PhD, is a presidential psychohistorian
trained in history, political science, and
psychoanalysis, who has been researching and writing
about the candidates and presidents since 1976. He is
Editor of Clio’s Psyche, a founding faculty member at
Ramapo College who formerly taught at Temple, Rutgers,
and Fairleigh Dickinson universities, and a founder and
past president of the International Psychohistorical
Association. He has over 200 publications and for over
three decades has organized psychohistorical meetings in
Manhattan on a regular basis. He has published on the
dreams of historical personages such as Humphry Davy,
Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelly, and
Robert Lewis Stevenson, as well as historical dream
methodology. He studied dreams in psychoanalytic
training and later with Montague Ullman (1916-2008, a
pioneer in the field), ran dream workshops for years,
devised a method of probing the dreams of historical and
public personages, wrote various articles and chapters
of books on dreams, and edited the dreams of others as a
journal editor. Prior to working on Obama’s dreams, he
did an intense biographical and psychological portrait
of the Illinois Senator, published in the fall 2008
issue of the Journal of Psychohistory. Dr. Elovitz may
be contacted at pelovitz@aol.com .

Kenneth Fuchsman,
EdD, is a historian who teaches
interdisciplinary studies courses online at the
University of Connecticut, where he has been in a
variety of capacities for thirty years. Dr. Fuchsman
writes on the history of psychoanalysis and is currently
exploring the dynamics of oedipality in single parent
and blended families. He may be contacted at ken.fuchsman@uconn.edu or
kfuchsman@gmail.com.

Florian Galler, a Swiss
macroeconomist with degrees in economic and social
history, lives in Zurich where he works as an economic
teacher at the KV Zurich Business School. Since his
academic position is not directly related to his
psychohistorical research he considers himself to be a
private, that is an independent, scholar. He is
past-president of the German Society for Psychohistory
and Political Psychology and a long time member of the
Psychohistory Forum. He may be contacted at
floriangaller@bluewin.ch or through his homepage of
www.psychohistory.ch.

Judy B.
Gardiner has been researching and writing on
the symbolism of her dreams since she retired from a
twenty-year corporate career. She has been a panelist at
the Association for the Study of Dreams and has lectured
on her dream message—the topic of Lavender: An
Entwined Adventure in Science and Spirit, her yet
to be published novel. In collaboration with Montague
Ullman, whose last five years she brightened, her work
focuses on how dreams reveal both our internal and
external environments. Ms. Gardiner also helped to
contact some of those memorializing Monte. She may be
contacted at Jbgardiner@aol.com.

Lloyd Gilden,
PhD, did brain research and taught psychology
at Queens College of CUNY in New York City for thirty
years before retiring from teaching. For the last ten
years he has been president of the Lifwynn Foundation
while continuing his clinical practice. He may be
contacted at kllg729@aol.com.

Ted Goertzel, PhD,
is Professor of Sociology at Rutgers in Camden, a
Research Associate of the Psychohistory Forum, and a
prolific author. Among his books are Fernando
Henrique Cardoso: Reinventing Democracy in Brazil (1999), Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and
Politics (1995), and
Turncoats and True
Believers: The Dynamics of Political Belief and
Disillusionment (1992). In 2004 he and his niece
Ariel Hansen updated and co-edited his parents’ 1962
book, Cradles of Eminence: Childhoods of More Than
700 Famous Men and Women. Prof. Goertzel may be
contacted at goertzel@camden.rutgers.edu.

Rajiv
Jhangiani, Ryan Cross, Sverre Frisch, Katya Legkaia, and
Ekaterina Netchaeva, work in the Department of
Psychology at the University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada, under the supervision of Peter Suedfeld, PhD, where they conduct
research on political psychological topics including
elite decision-making, terrorism, genocide, and
ethnopolitical conflict. Professor Suedfeld is a past
president of the Canadian Psychological Association and
a recipient of the International Society of Political
Psychology’s Harold D. Lasswell award for "distinguished
scientific contributions in the field of political
psychology.” Correspondence may be addressed to Rajiv
Jhangiani at rajiv@psych.ubc.ca.

Stanley Krippner,
PhD, is professor of psychology, Saybrook
Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco. He
co-authored Dream Telepathy with Montague
Ullman, a book that reviewed their experiments at
Maimonides Medical Center where he directed the Dream
Laboratory for a decade. In 2002, he received the
American Psychological Association Award for
Distinguished Contributions to the International
Advancement of Psychology. He may be contacted at
skrippner@saybrook.edu.

Philip
Langer, PhD, is Professor of Educational
Psychological Studies at the University of Colorado.
Together with Robert Pois (1940-2004) he published,
Command Failure in War: Psychology and Leadership
(2006). Prof. Langer may be contacted at
Philip.Langer@Colorado.edu.

David
Lotto, PhD, a psychologist/psycho-analyst in
Pittsfield Massachusetts and a Psychohistory Forum
researcher, frequently writes for these pages and the
Journal of Psychohistory. He may be contacted
at dlotto@
nycap.rr.com.

Wendy Pannier,
President (2005-06) of the International Association for
the Study of Dreams and a long time member of its
Board’s Executive Committee, published Dream
Appreciation featuring Monte’s work from 1996-2002.
She has conducted dream workshops and groups in the U.S.
and abroad and in recent years has developed programs to
help cancer patients work with their dreams and
nightmares. She also works with health care
professionals. Wendy may be contacted at
DreamWendy@verizon.net.

Mena E.
Potts, PhD, a University of Pittsburgh
Competency program trainer, is the founder of the Dream
Center for Education and Research, a past board member
of the International Association for The Study of
Dreams, and a Research Associate of the Psychohistory
Forum. Dr. Potts may be contacted at
Drmpotts@aol.com.

Burton Norman Seitler, PhD, a
clinical psychologist/ psychoanalyst in private practice
and Director of Counseling and Psychotherapy Services (CAPSR)
in Ridgewood and Oakland, New Jersey, is also Director
of the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Studies
Program of the New Jersey Institute for Training in
Psychoanalysis in Teaneck. Dr. Seitler serves on the
Board of Directors of the International Center for the
Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and may be contacted
at binsightfl@aol.com.

Charles B.
Strozier, PhD, educated at Harvard, the
University of Chicago, the Chicago Institute for
Psychoanalysis, and the Training and Research Institute
in Self Psychology (TRISP), is Professor of History at
John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well
as Director of the Center on Terrorism of John Jay
College. In addition, he is a psychoanalyst and a
training and research analyst at TRISP. In addition to
three edited volumes with Michael Flynn, his books
include Apocalypse: On the Psychology of
Fundamentalism in America (1994, 2002),
Lincoln’s Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait,
1982, 2001), and Heinz Kohut: The Making of a
Psychoanalyst (2001, it won the NAAP Gradiva Award,
the Canadian Goethe Prize, and was nominated for a
Pulitzer Prize). Strozier, who was the founding editor
of the now defunct Psychohistory Review, is currently
writing New York City and 9/11: A Psychological
Study of the World Trade Center Disaster and is
co-editing The Fundamentalist Mindset for
Oxford University Press. Professor Strozier may be
contacted at charlesbstrozier@yahoo.com.

Hanna
Turken, NCPsyA, BCD, LCSW, is in the private
practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in New York
City and is a senior member of the National
Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), as
well as a Research Associate of the Psychohistory Forum
and a member of the board and supervisor in the New York
State Society for Clinical Social Work. Turken has
published and presented papers at national and
international conferences on sexuality, culture, the
role of the father, sexual addiction, and other
subjects. She may be contacted at hjturken@verizon.net.

Robert Van de
Castle, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of
Virginia Health Sciences Center, is former president of
the Association for the Study of Dreams and the
Parapsychological Association. He is author of Our
Dreaming Mind (1994) and may be contacted at
riv@virginia.edu.